"...the idea of the earth as a geometric shape goes back in history at least to the Pythagorean school of thinking in ancient Greece. Its famous adherent, Plato, wrote that 'the earth, viewed from above, resembles a ball sewn from twelve pieces of skin.'" [Bird]
The last twenty years or so has generated a fleet of new grid theorists. A brief summary of their contributions follows in more-or-less chronological order.
Ivan Sanderson
The professional biologist who founded the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in Columbia, New Jersey, wrote "The Twelve Devil's Graveyards Around the World" for Saga magazine in 1972. Reprinted in Paradox, by Nicholas R. Nelson, Dorrance & Co., Ardmore, Penn. 1980.
"... with several associates, he set out to 'pattern the mysteries' by taking full advantage of modern communication technology and statistical data analysis. His success was startling. "The Twelve Devil's Graveyards Around the World," plotted ship and plane disappearances worldwide, focusing attention on 12 areas, equally spaced over the globe, in which magnetic anomalies and other energy aberrations were linked to a full spectrum of strange physical phenomena.
Highest on Sanderson's statistical priority list was a lozenge-shaped area east of Miami, in the Bahamas, on the western tip of the infamous Bermuda Triangle. This area's "high profile" of strange events, Sanderson concluded, was mostly due to the enormous flow of air/ sea traffic in the area. Other zones of anomaly, though less familiar, were equally rich in disappearances and space-time shift occurrences. ...
Another area of continuing disappearances and mysterious time-warps is the Devil's Sea located east of Japan between Iwo Jima and Marcus Island. Here events have become so sinister that the Japanese government has officially designated the area a danger zone. Sanderson theorized that the tremendous hot and cold currents crossing his most active zones might create the electromagnetic gymnastics affecting instruments and vehicles. His theory is now being balanced against several." - -Anti-Gravity page 35.
The Russian theorists credit Sanderson [see below].
Christopher Bird, in The Planetary Grid [New Age Journal, May, 1975 pages 36-41]
reported to America from Russia:
"On the last day of 1973, Komsomol's Pravda, the official newspaper for the Soviet Union's younger generation, ran a controversial article: "Earth, What Are You Anyway?" The story suggested that, far from being a simple spheroid, our globe started out as a crystal with angular dimensions. Only after millennia of motion and the actions of many forces did this crystal round itself into a ball.
Certain Soviet scientists are now maintaining that the "boundaries" of the former crystal now lie buried and preserved within the body of our planet. Some of them may protrude, however imperceptibly, through its surface in the same way that parts of the skeleton bonily project through the taut skin of a thin or emaciated human or animal.
Nikolai Goncharov, a Muscovite historian enthralled by the ancient world, knew nothing of these new and disputable theories. It occurred to him to mark on a globe all the centers of earliest human culture. Somewhere within him an "intuitive impulse," as the Russian youth newspaper put it, suggested that there might be a pattern, a geometric regularity, behind their genesis.
It was only after Goncharov met Vyacheslav Morozov, a construction engineer, and Valery Makarov, a specialist in electronics, that his vague impulse became first a suspicion, then a hypothesis. After several years' work, it appeared in Khimiya i Zhizn' (Chemistry and Life), the popular science journal of the USSR Academy of Sciences under the title: "Is the Earth a Large Crystal?"
The Russians also mention that Ivan Sanderson... has written that the triangle is not the only infamous region on the earth's surface but that there are nine others.
The ten regions, says Sanderson, are symmetrically situated around the globe, five above, five below, at equal distances from the equator.
Had the American investigator thought to add two more points, at the north and south poles, say the Russians, his scheme would have precisely coincided with the model which they have adopted. (The twelve points are 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 61, 62.)"
Bruce Cathie
A retired military pilot in New Zealand, Cathie thought to plot unidentified aircraft sightings on a map, and found a grid pattern emerging. Author of Harmonic Conquest of Space, the latest in a series of books on the harmonics of the world grid.
His article, Acoustic Levitation of Stones, appeared in Anti-Gravity. He has developed software to calculate light harmonics of global distances, called "Gridworks."
Bethe Hagens
with Bill Becker developed the EarthStar globe. "... the Earth [is] really a living crystal being with a geometric skeleton that could be mapped in its patterns of energy flows... in ocean currents, the winds, river systems, and distributions of precious minerals. It even seemed that ancient humans had known this sacred, hidden body of the Earth, and sited their civilizations to take advantages of her very visceral powers. [Dreaming]
"I found a picture of the world with a funny lattice work on it. It looked an if someone had put one of Buckminster Fuller's domes over the planet, and the design caught my eye. As I read the accompanying article by Christopher Bird, I learned that was indeed what had been done. Three Russians (an engineer, a historian, and a linguist) had found that the dome-like geometric pattern could be aligned on the Earth in such a way that the struts of the dome mapped out major geologic features (such as mountain ranges and river systems), and the connecting points for the struts fell at the sites of important ancient civilizations. There were many other correlations, and the authors had numbered all of the corners so that information could be collected and compared among a variety of researchers all over the world."
Bethe's research pointed out that certain hand-held artifacts supported the world grid model. Namely, the geometric carvings described in Zink, wrongly called "bolas" [Rings]; and in two inscribed stones bearing related angles but otherwise unrelated, known as the Flagstaff Stone and the Clay County, Missouri Stone [Geostat]. Bethe showed that certain ancient maps were apparently based on the same system [Anti-Gravity]. "Probably the most significant discovery I made, though, involved great circles. A "great circle" is an equator. It cuts a "sphere" exactly in half. At first glance, the Earth crystal map appeared to me to be a web, like Spider Grandmother, but in fact it was a perfectly symmetrical cluster of fifteen great circles - or hoops - that created the illusion of one hundred and twenty identical triangles."
[STRUTS missing from Russian model]
It was not long after I discovered that many Sioux tribes refer to life force of Earth as "the fifteen hoops."
More recently, Bethe has realized the EarthStar is a reflection of the sky.
"...One night, as I sat (again) looking at a blank computer screen, I looked up at my celestial globe, and began thinking about Plato. If it [the world grid] really were a universal model of all creation, there should be fifteen hoops in the sky. I found that I could use the Earth's path around the sun (the ecliptic) as the equator of the heavens, and a fifteen-hoop structure could be anchored to important places named in the world's sky mythologies... the star Sirius, the Crab Nebula at the tip of Orion's club, the Bear. Most amazing was that the ring of the Milky Way (as we see it in the sky) was exactly coincident with one of the hoops." [From Plato to Pluto].
Barbara Hero
Her article, "International Harmony Based upon a Music of Planetary Grid Systems," first published in the United States Psychotronics Association 1985 annual Conference Proceedings, and was reprinted in Anti-Gravity. Correlates the earth grid system with specific musical notes, thus enabling one to find harmonic relationships related to distances between cities and countries. A chart of miles and corresponding musical notes is included so that one can determine the musically harmonic intervals.
David D. Zink
Ancient Stones Speak: A Journey to the World's Most Mysterious Megalithic Sites (Dutton 1979) "Until the present work, however, no one has pointed out the surprising number of megalithic structures located at or near these intersections."
David Childress
Edited Anti-Gravity and the World Grid, which brought together articles by Cathie, Hagens, Hero, Leviton and Zink; and distributes the EarthStar globe and other titles of interest.
Jose Arguelles assigned the twenty Mayan day glyphs to the Earth in his Dreamspell game.
Krsanna Duran writing in Perceptions presents a system of mapping the earth using the 20 Mayan glyphs; her system differs from Jose's system. She divides the twenty points into five inter-penetrating tetrahedra.
Dorothy Leon
Able to see the energy lines, her map of western North America "The Wheel with Nineteen Spokes" she first released in Triangle from Mountains under the name Katrina (now out of print). [She sums up Triangle in Thirteen Steps of Ascension.] Her map corresponds closely with world grid points 8 and 19. It was redesigned slightly and published in 1995 by Dan Shaw under the name, "EarthStar North America".
Peter Champoux
Inspirator for ArkHom, a geometric map of the eastern United States, which nests within the earth grid. Peter is actively seeking to install monuments at key sites.
Dan Shaw,
Publisher of the EarthStar globe and EarthStar North America, realized that Dorothy's "Wheel with Nineteen Spokes" plus the Grand Tetons at the center, equals 20, and he correlated the 20 Mayan day glyphs to the Wheel.
Paul Devereux
One of the greatest contributors to the science of geomancy, just retiring from 20 years editing The Ley Hunter journal. "Let my last editorial statement on our subject area be to point out that geomancy is in fact moving into a more modern, westernized area of concern (the only way our culture will absorb the geomantic lessons that have to be learned) that we could best describe as "cognitive". It brings earth mysteries into the arena of consciousness studies (I know this is a difficult transition for many people). [The Ley Hunter #124, Winter 1995/ 96 page 1]. (Paul is not directly tied to the world grid theory, but still merits mention here).